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Reasons of the South in Grace King's Memories of a Southern Woman Of e-ISSN 2499-1562 ISSN 2499-2232 Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale Vol. 53 – Settembre 2019 A Sisters’ World: Reasons of the South in Grace King’s Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters Daniela Daniele Università degli Studi di Udine, Italia Abstract Grace King documented the American Civil War from the Southern perspec- tive of the losers, in times in which the Northern press urged her to embrace the winners’ ideology. As she witnessed the decline of the French colonial project in post-bellum Louisiana, her writing task was to preserve the Frenchified vernacular and the exquisite Creole traditions from oblivion. Her tales and memoirs from New Orleans’ history convey the tenacity of former mistresses and colored servants in mutual defense of their refined domestic order and family bonds disrupted by the brotherly fight. Keywords Grace King. American Civil War. Southern memoirs. Patois. Creole culture and interethnic relations in Louisiana. Summary 1 “Nègre” Servants and Private Archives. – 2 “Will They Kill Us All?”. – 3 Southern Counter-Memories. Peer review Submitted 2019-03-01 Edizioni Accepted 2019-04-04 Ca’Foscari Published 2019-09-26 Open access © 2019 | cb Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License Citation Daniele, Daniela (2019). “A Sisters’ World: Reasons of the South and Domestic Whispers in Grace King’s Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters”. Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale, 53, 205-224. DOI 10.30687/AnnOc/2499-1562/2019/01/010 205 Daniela Daniele A Sisters’ World: Reasons of the South in Grace King’s Memoirs of a Southern Woman of Letters 1 “Nègre” Servants and Private Archives In her discussion of the tomboy figure in Kate Chopin’s story “Char- lie”, Cristina Giorcelli (1996) argues that Miss Laborde’s male mas- querade did not only challenge a sexual and patriarchal order but also a social one. In her daily interaction with black servants and Acadian playmates, that Southern heroine of European descent also blurred class and ethnic boundaries in the Creole South (Giorcelli 1996, 31). In a similar interethnic perspective, Grace King’s stories set in Lou- isiana in the immediate post-bellum period show a strong interest in a wrongly neglected female world, whose domestic interactions be- come her vantage point to question the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon America and its dispersal of Southern families. King’s historical and literary focus on the aftermath of Civil War illuminates a time of pro- found disorientation which condemned her region to a long econom- ic stagnation, disbanding, along with the plantation system based on slavery, a Creole community with distinctive Napoleonic values. Born in a colony of both Protestant and Catholic faith,1 the New Orleans-born Grace King was the great-granddaughter of a “pros- perous lawyer” and of a lady of Huguenot descent who devotedly subscribed to the Harper’s Magazine, which became “a determining factor” in extending the girl’s literary education (MSWL 63). It was indeed her mentor, the historian Charles-Étienne Arthur Gayarré, who introduced Grace to the Harper’s editor Charles Dudley Warner and to the sophisticated literary circles in Boston led by Annie Fields and Julia Ward Howe, the latter embodying an indefatigable model of Southern woman traveler between North and South which King later took over. In the difficult times of the war’s aftermath, the social iso- lation of the defeated Confederates urged the King sisters to become cosmopolitan Southerners and seek “a second Patrie” in Europe.2 A faithful visitor of the literary Salon of Madame Blanc in Paris (MSWL 103), King documented the sympathy of her hostesses in Britain and 1 King thus depicts the influential reformed pastor, Charles Wagner: “Having dis- armed the criticism of Protestant rivalries by his perfect good will and genial humour, he had also gained the friendship of Roman Catholics by his friendly sympathy with them in their political troubles. As a stove radiates faith and hope, strength and ener- gy” (King 1932, 289). All references from this memoir will henceforth appear parenthet- ically and in footnotes with the initials MSWL, followed by page numbers. 2 “At this time a very vexatious and semi-political revolution was taking place in New Orleans, feeling dividing the citizens into two furious camps, even the ladies taking part of it. They had no vote in the proceeding but insisted upon rousing their own realm of society into partisan warfare. My own feelings were much engaged in the fight, and it was evident that literary work would be impossible in the turbulent condition life had assumed. Therefore my brother Branch and my mother, in order to separate me from a disagreeable participation which they knew I could not or would not avoid, suggested that the time had come for me to go to Europe” (MSWL 103). 206 Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale e-ISSN 2499-1562 53, 2019, 205-224 ISSN 2499-2232 Daniela Daniele A Sisters’ World: Reasons of the South in Grace King’s Memoirs of a Southern Woman of Letters France, as well as of the women from the old Continent and from the Northern states who returned her visits. She wrote both as a histori- an and as a fiction writer on New Orleans as a “place for shelter” for European patriots in times of deep unrest,3 drawing a clear trajecto- ry of the troubled transatlantic history in colonial times and during the Romantic revolutions. A descendant from Marion, a General of the Revolutionary War, King writes of her grandmother’s confrontation with “the sinfulness of New Orleans when she came to the city as a bride, fresh from the piety and civilization of Georgia, which she represented – for so she remembered it – as an earthly paradise” (2). As a Protestant daugh- ter witnessing the cultural and religious battles which divided the colony, King absorbed from her historical investigations and personal memories the echoes of the military and linguistic conflicts recently revived by Thomas Pynchon in Mason & Dixon (1997), in one of the most illuminating fictional accounts of multilingualism in colonial America (Sollors 2000). In particular, King relentlessly wrote about the traumatic transformation of the French colony of Louisiana into a region architecturally and stylistically redesigned by the Spanish and American occupants, adding to her New Orleans’ stories the lit- erary qualities of Francis Parkman’s histories and of Judge Gayarré’s chronicles of Louisiana. The latter first accounted for the double shift in power of the early French settlements to the Spanish and Yankee administration, struggling, like Grace, to preserve the city from de- cay and from the charge of racism made by Americans to erase all the signs of the Napoleonic culture. Before becoming the queen par excellence of short stories writers (MSWL 93), King learned to shape her histories in Parkman’s writerly way and to convey, like Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and her mentor Gayarré, in an exquisitely ornate style all the refinements of the “hereditary figures in New Orleans life” (287). On their trail, King depicted, between fact and fiction, the European substratum of New Orleans’ colonial history, obscured by the ideological layers placed by Civil War upon those regions. Her many histories of Louisiana start from the foundation of those terri- tories by Jean-Bapiste Le Moyne Bienville, who first settled there to the (Civil) War, which she witnessed as a child. The heroic deeds of this French colonial hero are romanticized in her historical fiction La Dame de Sainte Hermine (King 1934), revealing her impulse to re- 3 “As the War progressed, other foreigners came to New Orleans as a place of shelter until the trouble in Europe had passed and they could continue their travels. Standing out among these was a group of Italians, the Com Arch, Silvio Contri and his wife, ac- companied by a most beautiful young woman, Rita Zucconi, the daughter of a noted man of letters of Florence, and a friend, the Duc de Massari, young, handsome and intelli- gent, whom Rita married later in New Orleans. They came every Sunday afternoon to tea, a purely French gathering […]. They were all devotees of the opera” (MSWL 368). 207 Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale e-ISSN 2499-1562 53, 2019, 205-224 ISSN 2499-2232 Daniela Daniele A Sisters’ World: Reasons of the South in Grace King’s Memoirs of a Southern Woman of Letters construct a violated cultural background through her serious archi- val research supervised by Gayarré, to be later fictionalized in tales based on that vanishing world. The “heavy strain”4 of the times in which America established its supremacy as an English-speaking world was also stressed in the Pe- ter Parley’s Universal History, ghostwritten by Elizabeth and Nath- aniel Hawthorne, as the most remarkable event in the two terms of Thomas Jefferson’s office, since the greatest achievement of his ad- ministration was considered “the purchase of Louisiana from France, in the year 1803. The immense territory included the country be- tween the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains […] The last event of the war was the battle of New Orleans. On the morning of the 8th of January 1815, a strong British army advanced to take the city. But they were driven back with immense slaughter by the Americans, under General Jackson. Peace took place in a very short time after this battle. The United States have not since had any war except with the Indian tribes and with Mexico” (1837, 477-8). King recollects that transition through the eyes of the (mostly female) survivors of the French colony confined in sheltered homes and religious institutions.
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